Mixture

[S001GMU at nova.wright.edu]

first off, KE-RIPES guys, I only had my account run out of disk space
three times in the past week from mail from this list.. geessh... *grin*
we must be doin somethin right... ;)

It's good to be back.  Got swamped down with the whole end of quarter, 
finals week, getting ready to take off for spring break from work nastyness.
That and I took a few days this past week to take the plunge and put Linux
on my home machine (*BEEP* microsoft!   *grin*).  Only had a few dozen
messages to sift thru... ;)

letting players see the numbers:
  All I can really say is it's really a decision that should be approached
carefully.  Ballancing realism with playability is always a challenge and
this situation is no different from many others in that respect.  There's
no hard and fast rule, obviously, but think about what kind of system
you want to run.  Will you characters be another body for the player
to control, or will the character be something nebulous that can hop from
body to body, as in J.C's system?  The former can lean either way, but I 
think the player needs to have some system of reference, but the later,
where the physical body isn't as important, lends itself to less info
for the physical attributes of the body.

Intelligence attribute:  someone (J.C. I think) made a statement to the
affect that there was no real reason for an intelligence attribute.  I have 
to dissagree.  For a system where the character is just a different 
"physical" body for the player, ok, yeah, there should be no intelligence
attribute.  But for systems where the character is another being that
the player just pulls the strings on, intelligence is quite important.
For example, in my system, room descriptions are layered by levels of
detail (essentially).  The more astute a character is, the fuller a 
room description/graphical image of the room they will receive, the less
astute, the more "blury" the description will be (requiring explicit
commands to investigate something further).  How much the player has to
work with is based, to some extent, on the character's intelligence.
(some level of detail will always be presented, to make it playable.)

-Greg